January 21, 2013

"Get Our War Paint on and Go to Work: Gentlemen Prefer Blondes" by Krystal Languell

This semester, the department-wide freshman
composition final exam at one of the schools I teach for is about gender
performance and expectations in America. We’re all required to teach the same
two essays, which, when juxtaposed against one another, seem to do little more
than argue whether it’s harder to be a man or a woman: another false dilemma
from higher education. In my class, I’ve supplemented the essays with a
paragraph out of Judith Butler’s Gender Trouble, a discussion of the Bechdeltest and an episode of Father Knows Best, assigning new vocabulary words:
“performativity,” “representation,” and “patriarchy.”

In my experience, freshmen are wedded to the status
quo in all the ways that might make sense for a freshly-minted, terrified
adult, but their reluctance to question assumptions remains exasperating. They
text while I define the waves of American feminism. They laugh when I say “sex”
or “pornography.” They shrug when I scold them for not paying attention.Gentlemen Prefer Blondes does not pass the Bechdel
test. But, as we discussed in my class, the test measures quantity, not
quality. It’s about representation. Films such as Reservoir Dogs and Fight Club
are arguably great films though they don’t pass the test for their lack of
strong female characters. I wondered, is it possible for a film to fail the
test and not only remain great, but feminist? Are there great and feminist films in which women
spend all their time talking about men?

“We're just two little girls.”

Immediately, in the first line of the movie, femininity is used as an economic weapon. As Dorothy Shaw and Lorelei Lee, Jane
Russell and Marilyn Monroe open the film with a song and dance that tells a tale
of strategic performance: “I was young and determined / to be wined and dined
and ermined.” As they perform, the narrative is doubled as the lyrics foreshadow
the film’s plot, or at least its thesis statement: “Find a gentleman who’s shy
or bold / Or short or tall or young or old / As long as the guy’s a millionaire.”
We don’t know much about these women, just that they are stunning and beautiful
and, most crucially, they know that men love to look at them. In her book The
Female Thing, Laura Kipnis defines this power play as:

creatively
transforming female disadvantages into advantages, basically by doing what it [takes]
to form strategic alliances with men: enhancing women’s appeal and sexual
attractiveness with time-honored stratagems like ritual displays of female incompetence
aimed at subtly propping up men’s (occasionally less than secure) sense of
masculine prowess.

Dorothy and Lorelei know very well that they are not
“just two little girls.” They play the game Kipnis describes. The only accident
that occurs in the film is when detective Ernie Malone snaps a compromising
photo of Lorelei and Piggy, which actually looks more awkward than sexual.
Otherwise, this is what a smart woman looks like in 1953: giggling at things
she doesn’t think are funny, flirting with men she’s not attracted to. In
short, performing.

The week before I got a tattoo of a diamond across my wrist, I was flipping through a tattoo magazine
one of my roommates brought home. Past the soft core pornography spreads of
tattooed women, which annoyingly highlighted curves over body art, in the last
pages I found a Sailor Jerry style image: a cluster of cartoonish diamonds
draped with a text banner that read “girl’s only friend.” Like an old friend’s band
sticker that says “How’s My Fucking? Dial 1-800-TREMENDOUS,” this tattoo said fuck
you. I was into it, and decided to watch Gentlemen Prefer Blondes to figure out
whether I really wanted this particular fuck you on my skin for as long as my
skin lasts.

Money may not love you
back, but saying fuck you to the patriarchy does. I chose a simple geometric
diamond to be a bit more subtle. When people ask what it means, I want to say
“it means I paid to have a diamond permanently on my wrist,” but instead I usually
say “girl’s best friend.”

“Say, they told me you
were stupid. You don't sound stupid to me.”

“I can be smart when
it's important. But most men don't like it.”

Kipnis explains how, “shut out of decent employment, gals adopted a ‘pay-to-play’ strategy—men had to pay for
sex, with dinners, rings, and homes. Men are also required to kill spiders. All
this took some considerable effort.”

Count the number of
raised eyebrows and winks.

Count the number of times Dorothy sends Ernie Malone for cigarettes.

Count the number of men (the gymnastics team!). Count the number of women.

I don’t know if I’m any good at jamming Feminism 101 into the last three
weeks of freshman composition, but I suspect and hope that it’s a slow burn,
like good teaching always is. When I was a freshman, I too probably would have
snickered at my professor talking about a comic called Dykes To Watch Out For.
In fact, my version of this involved Daniel Clowes’ Ghost World and later
Miranda July’s No One Belongs Here More Than You, both of which I had to grow
into. I told my students to look around on the subway and notice the way people
look at each other: men looking at women, yes, but also anybody looking at
anybody else. I don’t want them to just see what is sinister about gender and
performance, but also what might be innocent or anxious, covert or charming.

Krystal Languell teaches
writing at the Borough of Manhattan Community College and Pratt Institute in
New York City. She serves as treasurer and studio coordinator for the Belladonna*
Collaborative, and edits the feminist poetry journal Bone Bouquet. Her first book of poetry, Call the Catastrophists, was published by BlazeVox in 2011.
Recent creative work has appeared or is forthcoming in Denver Quarterly, Columbia
Poetry Review and La Fovea.
She has published interviews and reviews with Coldfront, NewPages, Sink Review and The Poetry Project Newsletter.

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